If all you really need is SMB, then try Tailscale so you can access your computers as if you were local, from anywhere.

I had the same problem with USB docks. The filesystem didn’t matter. Without going into much detail, the solution is to use the usb-storage driver with quirks enabled instead of the uas driver. I blacklisted uas to force usb-storage on the affected devices. Some googling should turn up decent instructions.